Hackers Targeting Amazon’s Cloud Servers to Mine Bitcoin

AWS Cloud servers targeted by hackers for Bitcoin Mining

The hacker community has been quite a lot active especially after the unprecedented growth in the Blockchain technologyin past one year. Hackers have been targeting international servers in order to steal crucial customer information or cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Recently,hackers from North Korea have been allegedly targeting blockchain data and customer information of South Korea which was even confirmed by Police.

Now, a report from security Intelligence group Redlock shows that hackers have been targeting the AWS cloud services of two companies, not specifically to steal Bitcoins but to exploit and take advantage of the high-end computing power of the servers in order to mine Bitcoins. The report says that hackers have managed to get access to Amazon’s cloud servers after they found that the administration consoles weren’t password protected.

The Redlock report reads:

“Upon deeper analysis, the team discovered that hackers were executing a bitcoin mining command from one of the Kubernetes containers. The instance had effectively been turned into a parasitic bot that was performing nefarious activity over the internet.”

Kubernetes is an open-source technology created by Google which provides an easy way to write apps on the cloud. Both the companies that have been affected by this are multi-billion dollar companies – Aviva and Gemalto.

This has been one-of-its-kind attack by the hacker community which was aimed at grabbing the premium space in the cloud storage. Usually hackers are found stealing data in exchange for money or any other demands.

Cryptocurrency mining is slowly getting increasingly difficult with each passing year and requires super-intensive processing and computing services which could involve high costs. To avoid high-costs, the miner can connect a pool of computers to solve complex algorithms. As per its inherent design, bitcoin can be mined till a total of 21 million floating coins. however, with each passing year, the process of mining gets more and more difficult.

The craze for mining Bitcoins has also resulted in people using their workspace computers with higher processing capabilities. Last year government of Crimea fired two IT workers after finding them to mine Bitcoins on their work computers. Similarly, an employee of the US Federal Reserve was fined and put on probation for mining on servers of the US Central Bank.

Bitcoin mining is mostly carried out in China due to lower electricity cost. As a result, China is becoming a hub for Bitcoin mining and various private players are setting up their Bitcoin mining farms in China.

After China, now Russia wants to be the Bitcoin mining paradise. The electricity supplying companies in Russia are now providing dedicated power houses to Bitcoin miners as Russia in order to boostBitcoin mining in Russia.